Safety Hazards Can Be Anywhere
Lyman-Richey Corporation Materials Coordinator Jennifer Rourke places a three-points-of-contact sticker near an unmarked ladder at the corporate office.
It’s easier to recognize potential safety hazards when you’re around big equipment with lots of gears, buttons, and switches.
But jobsites and plants with heavy industrial equipment aren’t the only places accidents occur.
“Even though we think more of the plants and equipment when we talk about safety, there are opportunities to look for and address issues at the corporate office, too.”
Lyman-Richey Corporation Materials Coordinator Jennifer Rourke was walking up the stairwell when she noticed a possible safety issue.
“We had a discussion about placing three-points-of-contact stickers on our trucks and ladders at the plants, and this ladder to the roof caught my eye.”
She mentioned the ladder to Jarod Hendricks, Lyman-Richey Corporation’s Vice President of Concrete, and now there’s a sticker reminding people to use three points of contact whenever they go up and down the ladder.
”Even though we think more of the plants and equipment when we talk about safety, there are opportunities to look for and address issues at the corporate office, too,” Rourke said.
According to the National Safety Council, the top workplace injury event resulting in lost work days is actually overexertion, which is usually associated with lifting or lowering objects or repetitive motions. Those kinds of actions and motions happen in office settings all the time.
And slips, trips, and falls make up 1/4 of workplace injuries — again, hazards and dangers that can be found in offices and jobsites alike.
“We have all heard the message, ‘When I see something, I will stop and do something,’ or ‘Put safety first,” and I believe we all have encountered moments throughout our day or week where we have made a safety observation,” Hendricks said. “The big question is did we do something about that observation or did we let the moment pass?”
Hendricks said Rourke also noticed that a toaster in the kitchen area was malfunctioning and tripping the GFI circuit, a hazard in many ways.
“Both of these safety observations could have easily been overlooked, but thanks to our ‘Office Safety Champion,’ Jennifer Rourke, both were correctly identified and evaluated with preventative action steps taken to eliminate the potential hazards. Jennifer’s observation and action is a great example that we don’t have to be working at a production facility or project site to champion safety. We can make safety a priority wherever we are, even right here at the office.”